The Critical Success Factor for Internet Marketing

You might put that another way and change the one word answer to “commitment” instead. Because commitment implies that you are going to take continuous action, which I believe to be the whole key to success.

When I first started out in Internet marketing I was taking a lot of action, and very little of it was actually effective. This is fine so long as you have the commitment part in place, and can continuously evaluate and readjust your course as you go along. This is what happened to me when I started out on 5/1/06 when I signed up for Clickbank and created my own product. This was my first attempt at making money online and of course it failed miserable. I actually registered the domain best-slot-machine-strategy dot com and attempted to sell some stupid system (that I made up!) to people for 20 bucks or something like that. I then tried to use PPC traffic to find a buyer and my plan was to make a million dollars by just scaling this up to the moon. What the heck could possibly go wrong?

After spending like 30 bucks on PPC someone (a competitor) bought my system for 20 bucks and then promptly requested a refund, which Clickbank gave him automatically.

At this point I realized that I needed a new strategy.

On 5/18/06 I registered a website that I would eventually take to over $2,000/month in income and later sell for $200,000. That probably makes it sound like it was a lucky idea that just took off on its own. Not true. Let me explain how I went from nothing to something–it was actually a long slow process.

I started by putting up a few articles and (back then) building some very cheap and easy links (think Goarticles, eZineArticles, etc.). Not much happened for a long time and I completely redid the theme here and there, changed the layout and look of the site, and so on. I might have only had about 30 articles or so for quite a while. At this point I was just dabbling and screwing around, for the most part.

Later on I got a bit more serious and tried to build more links and create even more content. I may have took it up to about 50 to 100 articles or so. And I tried to slap AdSense on the site at some point but nothing really seemed to happen. I gave up for a while and lost interest, just kept working at my day job like I had been all along and paid no mind to the online business stuff.

At some point I got restless and sick of my day job so I jumped back into my stats one day and say a glimmer of hope. A dollar click here and there and my wheels started spinning again. Maybe I could scale this up into a success after all (I thought at the time).

So I took more action (there it is again, action!). I put up more posts. I created more links. And then at some point I hit the big $100/month in income. Later I hit $300 and then I really got serious.

What I did was to sit down and make a list of articles I wanted to write. I did some quick keyword research and then I set out to create 40 article titles based on those keywords. Then I started writing the articles, like a madman.

I was still working of course and I did not really understand the game yet, so I only wrote like one to three articles per day. This was enough to eventually push the site up to $500 to $600 per month in income.

I stayed stuck at this level for almost a full year. Right around the $600/month level. I was still working 40 hours per week at my day job, just like I had been all along. I must admit for much of that year when I was stuck, I was not doing a ton of work on the site. I put up a few articles here and there but not enough to really move the needle.

And that is the whole point right there. I was taking action, but not enough to make a difference.

So what is the kicker here? Just this: at the end of that year when my earnings had stagnated at $600/month, I finally got fed up enough with my day job that I decided to get reckless. As one of my online mentors once said “you have to get a bit nuts to succeed in this business.” He’s right.

So I took a month off work and I wrote close to 25 articles per day. Up to 20,000 words each day in new content. This was the turning point. This is what taking “massive action” is all about.

And this is the critical factor for your success in any business. You have to get a bit nuts. Of course you don’t want to sacrifice quality just to get quantity, anyone can advise you of that much. But the key is to learn how to do quality, and then go absolutely nuts. Go to town. Get crazy. Set a daily goal for yourself, and then multiply that by about 10. This is where you want to be.

When you hear a story about someone who suddenly made it big with their business, chances are good that they did not just get lucky….they probably multiplied their effort by ten and went berserk. This is exactly what I did when I finally took that month off of my day job so I could write about 500 new articles for my website.

If you want massive results then you need to take massive action. Quality standards tend to change on the web among search engines so you may not be able to write 25 articles every single day. For example, I only publish articles these days of 3,000 words or longer. Quite a difference from seven years ago!

You may also not be able to write as quickly as you like. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Start producing amazing content, then scale it up and get fast. Find out what is working and then go nuts. I tried to make it work by creating a Clickbank product and that failed. So I moved on and created a content based website. That showed some promise so I applied some serious leverage in the form of high volume.